Sarah is dead and so are all the other Sarahs. The ocean is green and chunks of still-existing land are covered with cockroaches, who survive everything. The cockroaches cavort in burnt metal shells and on plains of melted plastic. Everything else is scorched and dead. Hollowed out clownfish stick and dry on the femurs of former Sarahs.

Their bones would look the same, if anyone was there to see them—the witches and sex workers, welfare moms and accountants, fat girls and CEOS, oil drillers and sea captains and Marxist lesbians have become piles of ivory sticks, tumbled smooth like driftwood by the radioactive sea.

The sea is putrid and foamy. Styrofoam bobs everywhere in tiny popcorn pieces and great slabs swathed in algal goo. The coral is bleached white and disintegrated, floating in pieces that at first glance look indistinguishable from the styrofoam, indistinguishable from the bones. Under layers of oil and toxic waste, pale and glowing fish with balloon heads and dragon tails survive. They look like dancing spinal cords and movie ghosts as they navigate the two feet of liquid remaining beneath the oil.

Eventually it gets them: the iridescent blue lipped fishies are trapped in coagulated gasoline.

Meanwhile winds and heat and other forces break the bones of the Sarahs and other creatures apart. The bones become shards and then sand. The creatures become beaches. The creatures become bluffs overlooking the toxic, glowing sea.

The earth enters a purple epoch. The sea is purple and covers almost everything. New bacteria take reign during the purple epoch. The hotter temperatures create a party atmosphere for all kinds of sporrias and phillas and cocci. Flava and pusilla and humiferous bloom and spew, knitting together in great roiling clouds. The ocean fills with jellies and foams and thick mists formed by strange combinations of violaceum and plastic, of globiformus and tin. Bacteria are born who love the plastic, who devour it like its a salty snack and become part plastic. Bacteria are born who love the plastic in a different way, who help it join together in great multicolored reefs. There are waves and more waves, and the bacteria and materials get bored of each other and the ocean becomes all liquidy again, clear purple. Like the vagina, the earth is self-cleaning. This is all millions of years or two seconds, no one is there to count.

The continents disappear in the deluge and millions of years or two seconds later, they emerge. They move around a little and new chunks of land break off. 

Some bacteria like to break things apart and some bacteria like to meld things. Plastic and styrofoam and tin have glommed together in the temperate region that was once the arctic and formed a new continent. This continent is shiny and beautiful, with metal spires, with reflective plastic flats, with bumpy white hills of transformed foam. The transformed foam is so nice—imagine styrofoam adhered together in clumps that've been kilned and shellacked: it looks like that.

Bacteria smush their genes around and make bigger bacteria and then slimy ocean swimmers and then tentacled ones and then rooted green and purple streamer-like ones. The swimmers get bigger and leggier. Over the course of millions of years or two seconds, they develop better vision and more elaborate ways of loving each other. They rub up and combine in ways that eventually lead to underwater breath control and easily-manipulable fingerlike extensions. Millions of years or two seconds later they climb out of the sea, onto the continent of foam spires and plastic slides and multi-textured mountains. They've been created in this world and so this world feels exactly right—like home and like a miracle at the same time. The radioactive air feels perfect. Their already-reptilian skins thrive, getting the vitamins they crave when they lie chest-up directly under the missing ozone. 

Because they have come from the sea, the creatures are good at breath control, and so they can make very specific sounds, and after a couple million years the specific sounds come to mean things.

The creatures find bones and put them together. They do this accurately to make erect humans and whales and they do it inaccurately and put a dolphin head on a human body. They make an accidental centaur. From these mis-assembled bones, new mythologies emerge, of what the world was before.

The creatures get names. No one is ever names Sarah again; that "r" is a doozy—but one day a creature is called something like Sah-wah.

Sah-wah walks on the talon-ends of six jointed legs through a white tunnel made of former plastics and foams, though to it, the tunnel just feels organic, calming. Just before Sah-wah is about to leave the tunnel, the tunnel walls become covered with rainbows. They appear as little squares, red yellow green blue indigo violet. Sah-wah has never seen so many rainbows. In an iridescent crack in the rock, there is a perfectly preserved glass prism, the kind that used to hang in hippie apartments. Sah-wah doesn't know about hippies or prisms and so Sah-wah feels full of praise and love for something yet unnamed, something like God and something like geological history and something like art and something like the Universe. Sah-wah sees a tiny square rainbow on the rough lavender-grey skin of one of its own legs and feels a surge of connection. Sah-wah presses its body up to a plastic tunnel wall and feels so grounded, so home.

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